"Raised by her Love" (1808)

This is notebook entry 3222, most likely from Jan or Feb 1808 (though perhaps a little earlier):

Rais’d by her love the Earthly of my nature rose, like an exhalation that springs aloft, a pillared form, at the first full face of the rising Sun, & intercepting full his slant rays burns like a self-fed fire, & wide around on the open Plain spreads its own splendor & now I sink at once into the depths as of a Sea of life intense—pure, perfect, as an element unmixt, a sky beneath the sky—yet with the sense of weight of water, pressing me all around, and with its pressure keeps compact my being & my sense of being, presses & supports—what else diffusing seemed—

Asra Schonthinu

Musaello rita gelocedri

The last two lines are deduced from Coleridge’s ‘Greek’ code, (a simple substitution, with Greek letters and other characters representing the English letters, but enough to baffle the casual browser).

Usually Coleridge switched to his code when writing about his deep but unreciprocated love for Sara Hutchinson (‘Asra’)—Wordsworth’s sister-in-law—and his sexual jealousy at his suspicions Wordsworth was having an affair with her (since W, his wife Mary and Sara all lived in the same house where Coleridge often stayed, any of them might read the notebooks, which presumably necessitated the code). ‘Asra Schonthinu’ is an anagram for Sara Hutchinson, and ‘Musaello rita gelocedri’, of course, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

This passage might be a first draft for a poem. It just about shakes-out, a little awkwardly, into blank verse:

                                             Rais’d by
Her love the Earthly of my nature rose,
Like an exhalation that springs aloft,
A pillared form,
At the first full face of the rising Sun,
And intercepting full, his slant rays burn
Like a self-fed fire, and wide around
On the open Plain spreads its own splendor
And now I sink at once into the depths
As of a Sea of life intense—as pure,
Perfect, as an element unmixt, a sky
Beneath the sky—yet with the sense of weight
Of water, pressing me all around, and with
Its pressure keeps compact my being and 
My sense of being, presses & supports—
What else diffusing seemed—

That this breaks off into the (deliberately) tangled inscription of Sara and Samuel’s names is interesting. This might be a poem, or the start of a poem (or notes towards the start of a poem) about STC’s ‘earthly’ desire, waking at dawn tumescent with thoughts of ‘Asra’—a common enough eventuality, physiologically, as men will confirm!—and being ‘burned’ (with shame at lust) by the ‘pure’ sunrise, slowly revealing the land, Coleridge then records his emotional sinking, ‘drowned’ in the impossibility of their connection and his agonising sense of baseness. That would certainly explain why he didn't develop it any further.

‘Asra’ is STC’s standard anagram for Sara, something which presumably links back to his styling of her, when he first met and was attracted to her, as ‘Asahara, the Moorish Maid’. ‘Schonithunu’ rearranges the letters of her surname to foreground her physical beauty (schön). ‘Musaello rita gelocedri’ is a considerably less euphonious anagramatisation of STC's name. We can see a different sent of word games here: ‘Musae[llo]’ (of the muses) ‘rita’ (writer) ‘gelo[cedri]’ (gelid, frozen, chill-hearted). STC: heart-chilled, muse-inspired writer.